And yet, and yet…

Starting in 2017 (7 years ago…yikes!) I began a project of filming one second of video everyday and loading into an app on my phone (aptly named One Second Everyday). I got the idea from my brother in law Thom Gibson, who is the creative element of the family! Over the next seven years I have documented the birth of two of my children, 7 years of ministry both as a Student Minister and as an Executive Pastor, and the completion of my doctorate. I made clips of my travels across the world, including Barcelona, Calgary, Harlingen, Cayman Brac, Rocky Mountains, Guadalupe Peak, Greece, Lesvos, and Egypt. I kept and stitched the moments together. If watched all at one time, the video would run for over an hour at this point.

Why this lunacy? Surely it would make sense just to let the times go on and to dump all the memories in the junk drawer of social media. After all this time, it is a recognition that the moments do slip away. I find myself laughing at dumb things we did, remembering the difficult times in our path, reliving the adventures. Where some see annoyance, I see that it was totally worth it.

You see, the mundane tells a story more complex than we’d ever think. It’s the run of the mill in the world that make the biggest difference and sing the greatest song. The things we’d soonest forget are the things we soonest need. Those stories continue to speak.

So I’ll continue taking my one second videos and remembering. Perhaps you’ll be in one of them. I hope you will join in the story and begin documenting your own.